Who says Apple has to roll out groundbreaking new hardware products to keep life interesting? Though the tweaks to its 17″ MacBook Pro (described in a post above) are noteworthy, upgrades to iLife, iWork and iTunes may end up having more relevance for more Mac users than any hardware introduction could.
Well, at least until we finally get that Mac Tablet, but that’s a story for another day.
Follow after the jump for details on the software upgrades rolled out today.
I have to admit I have been keeping abreast of technology news with one eye, sort of, during this Holiday Season. I have a family, and my one child is going to grow up fast, so I’m told. Thus, I’ve been spending more time with him since he’s off from school for the winter break.
I was a little surprised, then, to see all the hoopla frothing around HP’s introduction Monday of a new Home Media Server for automatically backing up and accessing digital music, videos, photos and documents from multiple computers on a home network. “That sounds kind of familiar,” I thought.
But there it was, all over Gizmodo and Engadget and TUAW and I said to myself, “Has the Apple community been somehow missing this appliance and its amazements?”
To be fair, some of the reportage was done in the context of wondering if Apple itself might be coming out with a similar appliance, and whether or how it might be integrated with the company’s MobileMe web services product. And, wouldn’t you know it, there’s this trade show coming up next week in San Francisco, which would be a perfect time and place to introduce just such a device. The suspense is now killing me.
But this HP baby that got all the ink? Well, it’s compatible with Mac and Windows, organizes files across all PCs on a connected network, streams media across a home network and the Internet, has a server for iTunes that centralizes iTunes music libraries on the server for playback to any networked Mac or PC running iTunes, and costs $600 with a 750GB hard disk or $750 for one with a 1.5TB disk.
Sort of like a souped up version of the Lacie Home Media Server I reviewed six months ago for Mac|Life Magazine, priced at about $150 with a 500GB disk.
Also to be fair, HP’s server plays nice with Time Capsule and Leopard, and lets you easily publish pictures and video to social networks such as MySpace and YouTube - which is not to say Lacie has not updated its software to do the same in the past six months - but on the whole, HP’s latest venture outside its core printer making business struck me as something of the very slow-news-day variety.
iPhone app developers iPaguri have a new offering on the AppStore today, called Walking Tour Fierenze, a one and a half hour audio guide for, you guessed it, a walking tour through the center of Florence, Italy.
The version currently available is in Italian only, with versions in English, French, Spanish and German coming. The developers promise anecdotes, curiosities, stories and legends about the famed center of Renaissance art and culture that “others can’t show you,” a claim we’ll have to get our Italy-based colleague Nicole Martinelli to suss out and possibly opine on regarding the true value of this $10 app.
In concept, however, iPaguri could be sitting on a gold mine. I envision Walking Tour versions for every major tourist destination and gallery in the world…
Seismometer is the iPhone app that can not only let you know if you’re in an earthquake (and how bad it is at your personal epicenter), but also records and displays the movement energy of just about anything.
Seismometer uses your iPhone’s built in accelerometer to measure movements in two axes, calculate the resulting energy and draw the results on a rolling scale.
Version 1.1 updates feature noise filtering, expanded frequency settings (20, 40 , 60 and 200hz), and choice of output to logarithmic or linear scale.
99¢ buys you fun for the whole family; no additional premium charged to iPhone users located on major fault lines.
57 Varieties of Fart-oriented applications are approval worthy in the eyes of the inscrutable AppStore gatekeepers. But iBoobs, a demo of which can be seen above, apparently violates a threshold of taste beyond which Apple is unwilling to go.
It’s nice to know there is a standard one must meet as an app developer, though, personally, it seems to me iBoobs at least uses the accelerometer to somewhat realistic effect.
Dimensions is a virtual toolbox offering a bakers’ dozen of functional tools animated with gorgeous 3D graphics that turn your Apple mobile device into something far more useful than any other cameraphone/musicplayer/gamestation-computer could hope to be.
Among the things you can do are:
* Use the caliper to measure to a precision of 0.156mm or 0.006 of an inch.
* A flexible tape measure lets you measure interior furniture, fabric and more up to 2.5 meters or 8 feet.
* Another tape measure handles interior and exterior distances up to 5 meters or 16 feet.
* A third measuring tool uses the iPhone’s camera to measure distances up to 25 meters, or 82 feet.
* Distances over 80 feet, up to a mile, can be calculated with the measuring wheel.
* The podometer uses GPS location services to measure thousands of miles or kilometers.
All calculations can be rendered in metric or Imperial scales. Dimensions was 2008’s best selling app in AppStores France and Italy, the #2 seller in Japan, Belgium and Switzerland, according to advertising placed by its developer, pocketDEMO.
And here we are in the US spending all our money on Sim City and Pull My Finger - it’s no wonder we’re a laughingstock in Europe.
It’s probably a good bet Phil Schiller is not going to introduce an iPhone with a built-in video camera in a few weeks at Macworld. In the meantime, Sol Lipman and 12seconds.tv have created a 99¢ app for the iPhone that lets you take 3 photos (either on the fly or choose from your camera roll), record 12 seconds of audio, which it ties into a multimedia masterpiece “video slideshow” you can then share with your friends and an unsuspecting world.
Slideshows are automatically uploaded to servers at 12seconds.tv, where users have an account from which they can manage their body of work. Every video has its own page (sort of like Flickr) and any video can be emailed, downloaded or embedded.
One of the 12seconds dev team told us, “we tried hard to keep the app simple and straightforward and fun.” From all appearances, they have succeeded. The slideshows make effective use of the “Ken Burns effect” that will be familiar to anyone who’s made a slideshow in iPhoto, and the recording quality of the iPhone’s microphone is surprisingly good.
Another consideration behind limiting the final output to twelve seconds was that “twelve seconds is about the ideal amount of time for most user-generated content,” according to David Speiser, who consulted with Lipman on development of the app. “The goal is to keep the barrier for consumption really low - no matter how badly a video might suck, you know you’ll never waste more than twelve seconds of your life watching it.”
Recent weeks have seen renewed discussion about the security vulnerabilities of Macs and the OS X operating system, though, as usual, it is primarily PC interests who say, “your day of reckoning is gonna come” and Mac interests who say, “Apple computers are the safest computers under the sun.”
Meanwhile, Apple released a security update on Tuesday that quashed 21 security bugs, news of which was taken by those on both sides of the debate as evidence their argument is right.
What better time, then, for Norton/Symantec to release Internet Security 4 for Mac and Internet Security for Mac Dual Protection, designed for those running Boot Camp or other Windows virtualization software on the Mac. Both products integrate all-new firewall and antivirus protection with tools to help protect against the increasing instance of identity theft.
I spent some time this week going over the UI and program features with Symantec’s Mac Product Manager, Mike Romo, and I was impressed with the granularity built in to the software’s control features and pleased to see Symantec has paid attention to creating a UI that says the designers have seen and used Macs themselves.
While automatically blocking attempted exploits using different protocols, Norton Internet Security for Mac’s firewall now also offers application control, which allows users to manage the applications that are connecting to the Internet, protecting Macs from spyware. New location awareness controls let users specify different connection settings for different networks to which a computer may be connected. The software is also integrated with Symantec’s DeepSight Threat Management System, an evolving database of known bad actors. Firewall rules are automatically updated at least once a day to protect against the latest attacking IP addresses.
This is powerful software that should appeal to rabidly security-conscious Mac users - especially the growing cadre of multiple-user businesses, schools and enterprise customers who have adopted the OS X platform - who will be happy with its degree of configurability as well as the extensive live monitoring and event logging it makes possible. Those who want to “set it and forget it” can also feel secure from phishing, malware or hacking threats they believe are lurking out there for the Mac.
Available now for the US from the Symantec online store and through various retail outlets, Norton Internet Security 4 for Mac is US$79.99, which includes a one-year subscription to Symantec protection updates. The suggested retail price for Norton Internet Security for Mac Dual Protection is US$89.99, which also includes a one-year subscription to Symantec protection updates.
Tune Up, already a popular iTunes plug-in for Windows, makes its OS X debut on Thursday, promising to automagically bring order to your hopelessly unorganized iTunes Library and bestow upon you missing cover art, concert information, music videos and news about your favorite artists, all without your ever having to leave iTunes.
Nicely presented to a snappy backing track in the video above, Tune Up will first analyze your library, presenting you with information on all the megabytes of music you have labeled Track 1, Track 2 and so on, all the Unknown Artists, Unknown Albums and missing information keeping your database from being fit to be housed in the Library of Congress.
Once you’ve been shamed to learn how sloppy you’ve been about importing music onto your Mac, Tune Up gives you the chance to clean up your mess and the automagical stuff really starts to happen. Using a secret forensics algorithm, the program takes an “audio fingerprint” of each mislabeled track and compares it to the 90 million song Gracenotes® Global Media Database and automatically fills in the missing information.
“All of us here are entrenched in music. We’re cranking tunes all day,” says CEO and founder of Tune Up Media, Gabriel Adiv. “We’re also the type of people who want all of our cover-art, don’t like missing concerts and spend hours online looking for YouTube videos, news, and merch from our favorite artists.”
Once your library has been cleaned and all your cover art rendered, Tune Up knowingly displays upcoming local concerts for every artist in your collection, and fetches YouTube videos, Google news and Wikipedia bios related to any playing track. The best part of this feature is that it’s built in - no filling out extra forms or compiling lists of favorite artists or albums from scratch.
For a limited time, a full-featured version of Tune Up is available with 500 “cleans” and 50 cover art “finds” for free. “Tune Up Gold” provides unlimited cleans and cover art finds for a one-time fee of $19.95 or an annual subscription of $11.95. The OS X version launching Thursday requires Leopard, but the company plans a release supporting Tiger soon, as well as support for Windows Media Player and AOL’s WinAmp later in 2009.
It works well on an iPhone, complete with a shiny icon if you decide to add it as a home screen bookmark. It’s great if you want to access your bookmarks on the move; what’s missing (and is equally important in my opinion) is a view of your network’s bookmarks.
I agree with Fraser Speirs - my Delicious network is a fabulous source of links, news, ideas and stuff of interest, and it’s compiled automagically for me every day by 58 people I know, like, and admire. I couldn’t live without it.
Here’s a demo video for Star Walk, the astronomy app for iPhone and iPod I posted on yesterday. The more I look at this app, and the more glowing comments it gets from both reviews on iTunes and CoM readers, the more I wish I’d paid a little better attention in my college astronomy class.
Fluid Tunes is a pretty cool free app from Majic Jungle Software that uses your computer’s camera to interpret movements of your head, hands or feet, letting you browse, play or pause your music in iTunes without touching your keyboard or mouse. It works on OS X 4.11 and higher and is a tiny (788K) universal binary.
Stainless is a multi-purpose browser for OS X inspired (according to its developers) by Google Chrome. The early beta version (0.4) available for download works only with 10.5 (Leopard) and appears to be a fun side project for the engineers at Mesa Dynamics, who developed Stainless to leverage multi-processing technologies they developed for one of their other products, Hypercube.
Blogger Jackson Chung has taken Stainless for a spin and writes that it has potential. “It is a fair bit more stable, quicker and simpler to use [than other Mac browsers] - and that appeals to most people who are stuck with the productivity-driven mindset of Do more with less time.” He applauds Stainless’ simple UI and the fact that every browser tab runs under a separate process.
Unlike Safari, for instance, which runs tabs under a collective process, Stainless ‘feels’ lighter, according to Chung, and the whole surfing experience seems quicker and more responsive.
Google is working on a Mac version of Chrome and Media Dynamics gives the impression that Stainless may well be no more than a demonstration of the possibilities we could see when Chrome for the Mac is finally released. Until then, however, Stainless looks to be a taste of things to come.
Apple’s latest lstandalone Cinema Displays, the 24″ widescreen with LED backlight technology announced in August, have shipped and began arriving Wednesday for customers also fortunate enough to own Apple machines with mini-Display port connectors.
The new 21lb bright, shiny things work only with the new MacBook and MacBook Pro notebooks and the Macbook Air, a limitation puzzled over by many in the wake of the August announcement, but now that they are here, object lust would seem to be kicking in predictably for many.
Ars Technica blogger Clint Ecker did an unboxing first impressions post on Wednesday, a few shots from which can be seen in the gallery below. Of note is the high-gloss reflectivity of the display glass and the fact that Mac OS X elegantly defers to the display’s iSight instead of the notebook’s. It also uses the USB audio on the display, disabling the output on the notebook until you plug into the notebook’s headphone jack. Ecker says the Cinema Display appears “slightly brighter” than the display on a similarly sized iMac.
iFrogz, developer of accessories for iPod and iPhone announced the availability of its first line of customizable earphones Tuesday, claiming to offer over 200,000 unique possibilities among three new products.
I could think of any number of words to describe what may be going on in the marketing department at the company’s Logan, UT headquarters, but they can certainly be said to think different.
For starters, the product line is called EarPollution, with individual offerings named Hype, Fallout and Nerve Pipes. The whole campaign calls to mind some kind of industrial accident rather than a new wave of must-have items in the over-saturated earphone market. Then again, standing out from the crowd is a definite strategy.
And stand out the iFrogz headsets do, too. From the ultra-bling options available on the Nerve Pipes to the slightly more downbeat style of Fallout (both over-ear) and the low-profile, in-ear Hype, users can customize color and artwork for headbands, speakers, earpds, even hinges (on Nerve Pipes), giving them what iFrogz CEO Scott Huskinson calls “complete creative control to develop something truly unique and original.”
Styles retail from $19.99 for the Hype earbuds, and $34.99 for both the Fallout and Nerve Pipes. Despite the estimated 235,000 unique combinations currently available the company promises more customizable options will become available at a later date.
Now that iPhone Firmware 2.2 is out (all 245.7MB of it), what do we all think of it? Initial reactions around the web seem broadly positive, and my own experience so far matches that. In recent weeks I’ve been seeing quite frequent application crashes on my 2nd gen iPhone, so I’ll be interested to see if they happen less often now. On very first impressions, the phone feels faster and snappier in use post-update.
Most of the changes were published in advance, but there are some hidden extras that are new to me.
Google’s voice search application for the iPhone is nothing short of spectacular. After tantalizing would-be users with either a PR goof or a brilliant marketing ploy that resulted in a delayed release on the AppStore, the updated version of Google Mobile finally hit on Monday and I got it on to my phone last night.
It’s like the home screen says, “For voice search, just bring the phone to your ear and speak. Really, no buttons required!” The program offers to let you watch a video to learn more, but it’s about as easy as it gets to call up a search results page that gives you just what you’re looking for simply by speaking into the phone.
When I searched for “70 Harper” the program returned results for “cindy harper,” but when I amended the search to “70 harper street, san francisco” I got a Google map pinned exactly to the address I spoke into the phone. Speaking about the incredible performance of this free app with my colleague Leander Kahney this morning, he agreed Google has served up something pretty amazing, saying, “it even understands my weird English accent.”
Say what you will about Google having worn out its welcome, or being on the downside of its rise to Internet glory, this advance in mobile search technology is a huge leap forward in this reviewer’s opinion. The iPhone may not yet be a fully functioning Star Trek communicator, but Google’s voice search brings it closer than many thought we might get.
Google introduced Earth for the iPhone and iPod touch today with a free version of the fascinating desktop program that literally puts the whole world in your hands. I’ve spent a good portion of the morning playing around with it and am pleased to report the satellite imagery and 3D terrain effects are quite amazing.
Earth makes impressive use of touch screen technology and Apple’s accelerometer, letting you spin the globe with a swipe of your finger and literally tilt your view to the curvature of the earth to see the terrain of whatever place you’re visiting. The application has a ton of information and labeling built in, with links to over 8 million Panoramio photographs and Wikipedia articles you can read within Earth or jump to in Safari.
Google’s handy two minute video linked above explains the app pretty well, and there’s additional information at the Google Earth and Maps Team blog.
I’ve also posted below a gallery of screenshots from my journey this morning. Based on my initial experience, I’d say Google Earth is likely to become a popular time wasting app in a hurry.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you can’t have failed to notice that iTunes 8 arrived to some fanfare earlier this week. I’ve been putting it through its paces, figuring out whether the new features are any good, and scoring them using our patented* rockometer.
It’s the grudge-match of the century (well, of the month… at least if you’re a web designer and are sick of iPod coverage): BBEdit 9, the old warhorse that’s been around for 17 years, versus the young pup from Panic Software, Coda 1.5. I’ve been using both over the past week, and my first impressions are below. Over the next 60, I’ll be using both apps for my web-design workflow (not programming nor copywriting) to see how the new versions measure up in that space and how much they can reduce my reliance on other software. In the meantime, here’s a brief overview, in brand-new, patented “yay” and “yuck” categories…
BBEdit 9
Yay: Non-modal windows for search finally don’t suck(™ ® etc.), speeding up find and replace massively. Being able to directly edit in results windows is great. Code-folding is now much easier to deal with using the keyboard. Projects work fairly well, providing a rapid way of caning through loads of files when editing. Document stats (live word count, line count and character count) are really good.
Yuck: Text completion just feels wrong: although it’s beneficial to writers as well as coders (due to including words rather than just code), it feels awkward, sluggish and not particularly accurate—it just doesn’t seem to ‘get’ what I want to input. The interface, while better than it was a few versions back, is starting to feel old. The preferences make me want to cry. Speed differences with large files don’t appear pronounced (or, frankly, in existence).
Coda 1.5
Yay: It’s like someone stuck a rocket up Coda’s bottom—the app feels so much faster than version 1.0, which I found borderline unusable. Coda’s speed bump has suddenly made its auto-complete very lovely indeed. The Clips window’s been sorted out, and you can now group clips; with tab triggers, you can easily add huge chunks of code or single elements. Multi-file search and replace is lovely.
Yuck: Still no custom shortcuts for invoking Clips from the keyboard. (C’mon, Panic! This is one area everyone else—even Dreamweaver—runs rings round you.) No code-folding. CSSEdit’s CSS tools still make Coda’s look a bit rubbish.
Overall
I’d rather like someone to smush these two apps together. Either that or improve BBEdit’s text-completion, workflow, and interface, or add to Coda code-folding, and keyboard shortcuts to its clips. Still, here’s to the next two months, where I’ll figure out which one’s really worth your time, web designer chums.
I probably shouldn’t be saying this on a Mac site, but reputation be damned: I’m quite interested to see Windows 7. Let me explain why. (Hang on while I put on my flame-proof jacket. There.)
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Steve Jobs in January 2008. Picture by Macinate. Creative Commons.
In the wake of Apple pulling out of Macworld — and the prospect that Steve Jobs may leave the company — many are wondering if Apple will survive without him.
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Who says Apple has to roll out groundbreaking new hardware products to keep life interesting? Though the tweaks to its 17″ MacBook Pro (described in a post above) are noteworthy, upgrades to iLife, iWork and iTunes may end up having more relevance for more Mac users than any hardware introduction could.
iPhone app developers 
It’s probably a good bet Phil Schiller is not going to introduce an iPhone with a built-in video camera in a few weeks at Macworld. In the meantime, Sol Lipman and 
